Busting Brain Myths With Dr. Judson Brewer

Do we really have a lizard brain? Is serotonin the “happiness” neurotransmitter? Dr. Judson Brewer, our frequent contributor and neuroscientist at Brown University, will clarify some common misconceptions about your brain. Listen in to learn why dopamine isn’t your “pleasure” neurotransmitter and how knowing your brain better can help you be a better person.

Transcript

Is serotonin really your happiness neurotransmitter?

And what about our lizard brains?

Do we really have one?

These are some of the myths that we will be debunking and clarifying today with Dr.

Jed on your life in process.

Hi folks,

I have a number of events coming up this fall that I hope that you will join me.

I'm going to be with the Southern California chapter of ACBS offering an online workshop on how to help your clients strive skillfully.

I'm also going to be offering a deep dive into the perspective taking process of ACT with Inside LA mid-October and that's for the general public.

Anyone that's interested,

It's been a year-long series of looking at ACT process.

I'm also going to be at an online summit for physicians towards the end of October.

It's the anti-wellness retreat for physicians.

You can check that out on my website.

And of course,

Don't forget to sign up for the From Striving to Thriving Summit that we are offering October 21st and 22nd,

But you can watch it on your time,

Anytime you like.

And then November,

I'm going to be offering a six-day ACT retreat in Sedona,

Arizona with mental health providers through PESI.

You can find out more about all of these events on my website,

Drdiannahill.

Com.

And I hope that I'll get to meet you at one of them.

So we're back with Dr.

Judd,

Dr.

Judson Brewer,

Our frequent contributor who has come on the show to talk about productivity,

Anxiety,

Digital distraction,

Eating,

And we're going to rewind a little bit and just talk about the brain today.

I was a biopsychology major in college and pre-med.

I actually wanted to be a psychiatrist,

But decided to take the clinical psychology route.

And you will notice on this podcast,

I do like to weave some neuroscience in when we can.

And one thing I have been noticing is that neuroscience is being woven into all sorts of things in our conversations with each other,

Even in the therapy room.

And I think it's helpful for us to take a look at some of the common things that we say about our brains and put them to the test a little bit.

Sometimes we,

And I'm saying we because I'm included in this,

Oversimplify things in our communication with each other.

And it's good to take a look and bust some of the myths that we may be passing around to one another.

So that's what we're going to do today with Dr.

Judd.

And just to remind you,

Dr.

Judd is a New York Times bestselling author and thought leader in the field of habit change and the science of self-mastery.

He has 20 years of experience with mindfulness training and also has really dedicated his career to scientific research.

He is the director of research and innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center,

Where he also serves as an associate professor in behavioral and social sciences at the School of Public Health and Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University.

He's the executive medical director of behavioral health at Sharecare,

Which is the digital health company helping people manage all their health in one place.

And he is the author of The Craving Mind and Unwinding Anxiety,

And a new book that's going to be coming out on eating.

I just got a preview of it.

It's fantastic.

I can't wait for you to read that when that comes to print.

You hear about it all first here,

Which is kind of fun.

We get the inside scoop on Dr.

Judd.

Alrighty,

I hope you enjoy this and pass it along to help others learn more about their brains and bust some of those myths that tend to be quite contagious.

So we are going to talk about the brain.

And I did bring in,

You're going to laugh,

But I brought it in because I would never have a use for this otherwise,

Which is my brain hat.

Oh,

That is awesome.

And I added the cerebellum this morning because it did not have the cerebellum.

And I knew that you're kind of into the cerebellum.

That was an optional add on.

And I didn't have enough time to cut out the other side and put the other side.

So I only have one cerebellum right now.

But I used this when I was teaching my kids.

I was their science teacher for a year.

And I was like,

Okay,

We're going to learn about stuff mom's interested in.

So this is my brain hat.

And it has all of the lobes.

I can send you a copy if you want it.

And you can print one out and make it for yourself.

I would love that.

Oh,

That is.

.

.

You have to put the frontal lobe at front.

So we are going to talk about the brain.

And we're going to talk about some myths and misconceptions and sort of common things that people say about their brains all the time that may be partial truths,

But are oversimplifications.

And you're going to set us straight,

Dr.

Jed.

So I have a few general kind of things I hear in my practice a lot,

Or I just hear when people are talking about brains.

And the first one is,

I think,

Related to this brain hat,

Which is the belief that we only use 10% of our brain.

Like we have this complex,

Cool thing in our head,

And that we'd only use 10% of it.

So is that true?

Yeah,

I don't know where it came from.

But I think there was a survey from about 10 years ago that found that actually 65% Americans believe this,

That we use only 10% of our brain.

So somewhere that meme got out there,

And I'm sure the internet didn't help.

So the truth is that,

No,

Not at all.

If you just look at how much of our glucose and how much of our energy expenditure is used by any one organ,

The brain surpasses all other organs.

It's a very highly metabolically active.

And if you look at just general neuroimaging of the brain,

You can look at brain metabolism or whatever.

It's basically almost all of the brain is very active almost all of the time,

Which is much more in line with how much energy our brain uses.

So if you think about it this way,

Our brain only weighs about three pounds.

It's a very small part of our body in general.

Even somebody who only weighs 100 pounds,

That's still only 3% of our body weight,

Yet it consumes a huge amount of our energy.

Yes.

I used to use that as reasoning for people with anorexia to eat,

Which was basically your brain uses 20% of your energy.

And if you aren't feeding yourself,

You're not feeding your brain.

And that's why you feel a little bit foggy or you feel a little bit depressed.

Your brain not only does it need glucose,

It also needs certain types of fats and it needs precursors to make neurotransmitters.

And if you don't have those things going for you,

Even just the basic nutrition,

Then you're not going to function so well in terms of your cognition and your memory and your emotion regulation.

I love that.

That's what a great way to help people help themselves.

Okay.

So you use more than 10% of your brain and you mentioned lots of your brain is active all the time.

It's not just sort of one part of your brain.

I think a lot of us talk about like my amygdala must be lighting up right now because I'm so afraid.

And we actually may imagine our amygdala is lighting up.

Is it that simple when we feel threat or fear that it's just our amygdala?

Yeah.

Another internet oversimplification.

What's a common phrase like,

Oh,

When you're afraid that's your amygdala,

Like you're pointing out.

No.

That's not really how our brains work.

You know,

Our brain regions are constantly talking to each other.

So even talking about a little part of the brain is really just kind of like taking a little snapshot of a tiny bit of the picture.

It's really that part of the brain is talking to a bunch of other brain regions as part of networks and then networks are talking to networks,

Which is part of this whole,

You know,

Brain,

Most brain being active most of the time.

And if you look at the amygdala itself,

It's really,

So certainly it gets activated during fear,

But it also,

It's basically there to help us pay attention to decide whether something is,

You know,

We need to move away from something if something is dangerous or not.

And so,

You know,

Just talking about it as this fear organ is a,

Is a vast oversimplification.

Joseph Ledeau,

Who's,

He's written a bit about this and he's trying to like,

He has a mission to change the wording around amygdala being the fear center.

And his mission is really to,

For us to describe it as the threat detector,

Because it becomes fear when our frontal lobe interprets the threat.

For example,

If you're getting on a stage,

The threat detector may increase your heart rate and make you breathe a little more quickly.

But then if you interpret that as,

Oh yes,

I'm about to perform versus,

Oh no,

They're going to laugh at me.

That will send you in different directions in terms of fear or excitement.

Again,

At this oversimplification.

Yeah,

Another note to that,

Because Joe Ledeau is the man and the person I should say,

When it comes to,

To amygdala,

He's been researching this a long time.

You know,

The amygdala is involved in all sorts of things,

You know,

Besides just threat detection,

Like processing of memory,

Decision-making.

So all of these are really important.

And as a side note for anybody that wants to look up Joe Ledeau,

He also has a rock band called the Amygdaloids.

And so you can find,

And they actually sing songs about the amygdala.

So if anybody's interested,

Then go probably find him on YouTube,

Rocking it out about the amygdala.

Having seen him in a keynote address at a conference that is like,

I'm really having to use my brain to imagine that.

Okay.

So related to the amygdala is that we have a lizard brain.

And so people will say things like,

Oh,

That's my lizard brain.

Help us understand that a little bit.

Yeah.

So here it's helpful to differentiate what can be useful as a heuristic,

You know,

It's like a training or explanatory tool versus what's real.

And you know,

I actually went back and searched this out a little bit to see like,

Where did this lizard brain thing come from?

And Carl Sagan,

You know,

This well-known cosmologist wrote in his book,

I think it was the Dragons of Eden,

You know,

Back in the seventies,

That where he highlighted a theory that a guy named Paul MacLean had put forward back in the 1940s.

And I think MacLean Hospital,

You know,

This famous psychiatric hospital that's part of the Harvard system is named after him.

And so MacLean had done these EEG recordings with psychiatric patients,

You know,

Very early days before neuroscience had even been developed as a field.

And he was convinced that emotions were seated in deep brain structures like the limbic system,

You know,

Which includes the amygdala,

But also the hippocampus,

The cingulate gyrus,

These other really deep brain structures.

And so he came up with what's called the triune model or this three-part model where,

And even as he put it,

It's this relatively crude and primitive limbic system sits on top of the brain stem,

You know,

Which he dubbed the reptilian part of the brain,

Because it's involved in things that reptiles also have to do like breathing and regulating their body temperature.

And on top of this limbic system sits the neocortex,

Which literally means new brain.

So layers upon layers was a simple and easy way for people to understand that,

Oh yeah,

Lizard brain and then,

You know,

Emotional brain and then thinking brain.

And to his credit,

That heuristic is still helpful today.

You know,

For example,

If our,

You know,

Our neocortex being the youngest and the weakest part of our brain,

It's the first that goes offline.

You know,

It's hard to think when we're freaked out.

And so we can see how,

Oh yeah,

That does make sense.

But our brain is just because these layers are there,

Our brain is just really very interconnected and all these things are working together.

But as a heuristic,

You know,

As an explanatory model,

It's still helpful.

It's like,

Oh,

Why can't I think when I'm anxious?

Well,

You know,

My prefrontal cortex is going offline.

So it doesn't mean that we literally have a lizard brain,

But that heuristic can be helpful to help us see,

You know,

Kind of understand how some of,

You know,

How we're acting so to speak.

So the structure of the brain does map on to evolution in terms of how our brain evolved and tell me if this is accurate,

Is that our brain sort of evolved just by like mostly adding on things.

It's sort of like if you were remodeling your house,

You just kept on adding on rooms as opposed to demoing things and,

You know,

Remodeling the right way.

Right.

Or starting like getting an architect in there and or an engineer and saying,

Okay,

What's the best way to do this?

So that's my basic understanding,

But I am not an evolutionary biologist.

So an evolutionary biologist would have a much more nuanced way of putting that.

But if you look even at how the human brain develops,

You know,

From infancy into adulthood,

You see these cells growing through,

You know,

Forming,

You know,

Layer one through I think layer five of the cortex.

And so there we see layers upon layers forming there.

So my understanding is that that's how evolution put it,

But I'm not the expert.

Okay.

Okay.

Well,

Here's another one that is often heard,

Which is serotonin is our happiness neurotransmitter.

And serotonin is,

You know,

If you're feeling depressed,

You just need more serotonin and that will make you feel better.

That we have some sort of depleted amount of serotonin,

That's what's making us feel depressed or anxious.

So help us understand serotonin as a neurotransmitter and maybe some more nuanced ways of looking at it.

Yeah.

The short answer is it's complicated.

Yeah.

And I think this may be more of a heuristic and also perhaps something that's helped people try to make sense when the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors first came out.

So when they first come out,

There was this huge excitement around,

Oh,

Here are these relatively safe medications that are going to help people with depression.

And so,

You know,

We,

We often think,

Oh,

Well,

The opposite of depression is happiness.

And if you are giving people extra serotonin and they're becoming less depressed,

Then they must be happy.

If you talk to patients with depression,

That's not exactly how it rolls.

And also if you talk to them for the folks that do respond to an SSRI,

And I wish these medications were more effective,

I'll just leave it at that.

I wish they were more effective.

But if you talk to people,

You know,

It's kind of helping them have less low lows,

So to speak,

As compared to like,

Oh,

Now I'm happy.

So that's a problem when it comes to it being the happiness molecule.

The other is,

If you look at where serotonin receptors are,

They're all over the body.

You know,

I think the most of our serotonin receptors are actually in our gut,

Which is why a lot of people have GI side effects when they first start taking an SSRI,

Because their gut's saying,

Whoa,

Where'd all this serotonin come from?

What's going on?

And so it messes with things there.

You know,

That's not about happiness.

That's about,

You know,

Having to run to the toilet or something like that.

So I think,

You know,

People,

We all want to have these explanatory models that are simple that are going to explain the meaning of life in ways that we can all understand.

Even neuroscientists don't understand the brain very well.

And we do this for a living,

You know.

So it kind of got this idea around this being a happiness molecule.

But if you look at it,

It's much more complex than that.

Right.

You would see some different things.

But there's some research on serotonin changing the way that maybe you perceive things.

So for example,

People that are depressed,

When they look at an ambiguous face,

They're more likely to perceive that face as angry or as hostile or disgusted than someone that's not depressed.

And when you introduce an SSRI to folks,

You actually see that change,

That perception change.

And it makes sense to me,

Like if you see people as hostile or,

You know,

Maybe having negative feelings towards you,

Then you're less likely to engage with the world.

And if you see people as,

You know,

You kind of err on the side of people are generally good,

Then you're more likely to go up and talk to them.

Right.

And then that could lead to things like how you act in the world within can change how you feel.

Right.

So there may be some,

You know,

There may be some things that serotonin is doing that is changing the way your brain works,

But we don't really fully understand it yet.

And that's just one example,

Probably of many other different things.

Absolutely.

I think that's a,

That's a really good example.

And just to add to that a little bit,

You know,

Serotonin does all sorts of things like regulating how much fat is made in our body,

You know,

And so we can think of this just building on what you're saying,

Like,

How do these things function with regard to our survival?

How do,

How do they affect how we engage with people all the way to how do they affect how much fat we store or how do we,

You know,

Keep serotonin is also involved in tracking energy,

Like how much we spend,

How much we build up.

So all sorts of ways that contribute to things like,

Hey,

I need to go out and explore and forage to get food because I'm low on energy.

Right.

Could similar to,

I need to interact with other people.

But all of that is much more nuanced than,

Hey,

It's the happiness molecule.

You know,

I'll just add as a it's it's cousin,

You know,

There aren't actually that many neurotransmitters that we have.

And so you think of these like,

I don't know what age or 10 or something like that.

It's not like there are a hundred neurotransmitters that do a hundred different functions.

It's like this small number of molecules are needed to,

To basically regulate everything that we do.

And they have to serve multiple functions and multiple different functions.

And so,

You know,

It's like they're doing double,

Triple,

Quadruple duty to,

You know,

Not just be this or that.

So another example of,

Of kind of a overgeneralization or even a misconception is around like dopamine being a,

You know,

Being a,

You know,

A happiness,

You know,

Like everybody's looking for happiness.

And so,

You know,

People think,

Oh,

Dopamine,

Dopamine,

You know,

This involves in reward and it's,

You know,

It's gotta be this pleasure molecule.

So I would say people talk about it more in terms of pleasure than happiness,

But often we associate pleasure with happiness,

But dopamine is not about pleasure at all.

You know?

So if you look at dopamine,

It fires in,

In two particular instances.

One is when something unexpected happens and that's there to help us remember,

Lay down an emotional memory that says,

Oh,

Remember that.

And so if somebody throws a surprise party for us and we're surprised,

We're truly surprised,

We get this big dopamine burst that says,

Oh,

Remember that.

Or if somebody scares the crap out of us,

They're surprised in a different way.

And we also fire,

You know,

Get dopamine firing that says,

Oh wow,

That was,

That was really scary.

And what that does,

You know,

With the,

The,

The fear thing,

For example,

It helps us learn,

Hey,

Avoid those situations.

So if we're in a dark street or something and we get really scared,

That dopamine fires that says,

Hey,

Don't do that again.

That could be dangerous.

Notice how none of that has to do with pleasure.

Right?

And so the other time that dopamine fires is once we learn a scenario,

So it was actually set up,

You know,

So we remember our food is you,

You're foraging for food.

Suddenly you find it,

Dopamine fires is,

Hey,

Remember where this is.

You know,

It helps us lay down context dependent memory.

And then it fires in anticipation where it says,

Hey,

You know,

Your stomach's empty,

Go get some food.

You remember where it is,

Go get it.

And it's,

So it's that itchy urge that says,

Go do something.

Where's the pleasure in that?

If it were pleasure filled,

We just sit in the cave and be like,

Yeah,

I don't feel like eating and that's not very good for survival.

So it's actually set up to drive us to do things.

It's set up to be uncomfortable,

Unpleasant,

So that we'll go do something to relieve that unpleasant feeling.

I just find that fascinating.

It's one of the biggest misconceptions I've seen.

Yeah.

It is sort of changing the way we look at dopamine is not something like when people say they get a dopamine hit,

It's not that you're getting a pleasure hit.

Dopamine keeps you motivated to keep going towards some hopeful future that it will be as,

As good as you think it's going to be,

But it often it's not so sad.

Yeah.

The closest I'll just add the closest that we see to,

To pleasure is really about excitement,

You know,

Cause we're anticipating the future.

So if there's something that we're anticipating,

That's that we think will be pleasurable,

That excitement is what people mistake for happiness.

But in fact,

Excitement is not happiness.

And it's like,

Ooh,

I can't wait.

It's a restless,

Itchy,

Urge equality.

If we really look at it at its core,

You know,

An edge is not very pleasant.

I was just talking to my husband about this last night because we're working on the summit that you were on it last year,

The,

From striving to thriving summit.

And there's a lot of work that goes into it.

And my husband's like my co-partner and doing all sorts of things for it.

And we were talking about how much fun we're having,

But it's all this fun in anticipation of the day when it releases.

And I remember last year,

It was such a bummer of a day.

It was like,

It's over.

This is such a bummer.

Like it's released.

It's not,

It's not,

Yeah.

What's next?

Yeah.

So I have to have other reasons,

Right.

To pursue something like meaningful reasons.

Okay.

So I want to bring back my brain hat,

Which has all the different,

It really does focus on that neocortex.

So it has the temporal lobe and the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe and the sensory cortex and the occipital lobe.

And I added on the little part,

The cerebellum.

And apparently you're like a fan of the cerebellum.

You think it's sort of one of the most under discussed parts of the brain that there may be something important about it.

So tell us about our cell cerebellum.

We don't hear much about it.

Well,

First let's talk about neurons.

So we have 86 billion neurons and we have 84 billion non-neuronal cells like glia and other cells that support neurons like with nutrients and cleaning things out.

And so that's 170 billion cells.

That's a lot.

You ready for this?

Of these neurons,

Only 19% are located in the cerebral cortex,

Right?

The rest of them in the cerebellum.

So the vast majority of our neurons are packed tightly into the cerebellum.

So more than the cortex,

And if you just using your brain hat as an example,

The cerebellum is a lot smaller than cortex.

So they're actually packed in there even more tightly than they are in the cortex.

So that in itself is pretty interesting.

And if you look at the Latin for cerebellum,

It literally means little brain in Latin.

So not only does it have the majority of our neurons,

But it actually,

We don't know a whole lot about its function because we've spent so much time studying the cortex.

But so just as an example,

In the 90s,

There was a 22 year old college student that had a tumor removed from her cerebellum and she started exhibiting strange behaviors,

Including acting inappropriately,

Like undressing in the hospital corridors and things like that.

It took her like two decades before her decision-making returned to normal.

And so that gave people the wake up call to say,

We often think about cerebellum.

What I learned in medical school was like,

It's about coordination of movement.

That's probably just a tiny piece of what the cerebellum does.

So it does muscle coordination,

But it also seems to be really in sync with the cortex.

So it's probably involved in things like language,

Emotional processing,

Even helping with divided attention and even autobiographical memory recall.

So there's a lot more that we don't know than what we do know,

But I think it's helping us all wake up to say this little brain is actually a big part of what the brain does and how it functions.

Well,

This is good because I think what you're showing us in this conversation is that we have these really simplistic views of something that's quite complex and actually even neuroscientists don't have a full picture understanding of it yet.

It's like outer space,

You know,

We have some,

You know,

Some landmarks,

We have some idea of what's going on,

But there's still a lot more that we don't know.

And this is our very own brain.

I mean,

This is just that it's fascinating to me,

And I love the update because I think that we need to update our information from time to time.

We learned something 20 years ago in graduate school or college,

And we just kind of hold on to it.

And then we take in information from Instagram and social media,

And we think that that's the update.

So this is a helpful update for all of us.

Any other brain sort of things that interest you about the brain that also could help apply to our life,

You know,

In terms of,

Could inform us in terms of our wellbeing and how we act in the world?

Well,

There is so much.

Maybe I'll mention one other thing,

Which is,

You know,

I think links up some of these heuristic concepts that we talked about before,

You know,

So this triune or this lizard brain,

You know,

I say that it's a helpful heuristic because we can look to see what is pragmatically helpful and what we see in our own experience that is true about these brain hierarchies.

So,

You know,

We form habits,

For example,

And then our neocortex helps us learn new things.

And so we revert back to old habits when our neocortex goes offline.

So what's the neocortex doing?

One thing I want to highlight is it's really,

It's involved in helping us plan for the future.

And so it takes past experience and it says,

You know,

Basically,

You know,

It forms probabilities about what might happen in the future based on our past experience.

This is where this phrase,

What's the best picture,

What's the best predictor of the future?

The past,

You know,

Past experience.

So here I like to think about,

You know,

What is the,

What's the neocortex doing and how is it helping us plan for the future?

And this,

This process is called predictive processing.

So Lisa Feldman Barrett and others have done a lot of really great work in discovering and also describing how this works.

Lisa's brilliant at being able to make,

Take these complex concepts and,

And distill them in a way that we can understand that are not oversimplified.

So imagine,

You know,

Something like having to,

If we had to relearn everything every day,

You know,

We'd be,

We'd be exhausted before the morning was over.

And so our brain has to be efficient in how it spends its time.

And when the,

One way that it does that is to kind of predict based on past experience.

So for example,

And I think of this as,

As set and forget,

You know,

If we,

Whether it's a habit or kind of identifying an object,

We can,

We kind of get an idea of what that's like and then we kind of,

We get a,

We see something that is like that and based on context,

Our brain is just going to assume it is that.

So I think that's one thing that's a really interesting mechanism that our brain has developed to help us survive.

But it's really about,

You know,

It's not about saying,

Oh,

You know,

I'm going to look at this carefully and see what it is.

It's about,

I'm going to assume that it is this,

That that's a cat until proven otherwise.

So I just highlight that because I think that's,

That's a really interesting thing.

And it also helps us see how we might,

You know,

If we don't pay attention,

It's going to be harder to update our representations of the world.

And it's,

It's going to be harder to learn and change because we're going to assume everything's the same until something has changed so much that it forces us to pay attention.

So I guess that that the pragmatic implication there is the more we can learn to be curious and pay attention.

And instead of going,

Oh,

I know what that is going,

Oh,

Is that what I think it is?

That helps us stay fresh and in kind of in a growth mindset as compared to in a fixed mindset.

Oh,

You know,

That,

That I know what that is.

It's never going to change.

Yeah,

So it's,

As we said with your mug earlier,

It's be more like the cat and be curious.

And I mean,

In terms of,

Yeah,

In terms of relationships and patterns that we get stuck in with relationships,

We can see why this is a problem.

We can see why this is a problem with biases that we,

The implicit biases that we hold that we never actually look at and say,

Is this true?

When we were at Palm Village,

There's this walking meditation that you do every day,

Like an hour long walking meditation with the community there.

And some of the signs that they put up were Thich Nhat Hanh's gathas,

His sayings along the way.

And one of his sayings that they put up that they hung in his beautiful calligraphy is,

Are you sure?

Just that question.

And so we've been using that in our house a lot of like,

Hold on,

Are you sure?

Because we assume all sorts of things we assume based on our past experiences,

But we don't update them.

So we're updating our understanding of the brain today,

But continuing to pay attention and be curious will help you update your own brain and asking,

Are you sure?

And looking a little bit more closely with more curiosity may open up some different perspectives and ways of seeing things.

So thank you.

Yes.

Alrighty.

Thank you,

Dr.

Jed.

We will see you again next month and appreciate your work in this.

And for those that want to actually take this,

They have like a course on the brain,

Like a mini course in one of your apps.

So folks who want to take that course from you,

Where would they take that?

So they can go to the Unwinding by Sharecare app and it's a free app.

Anybody can download it.

Anybody can use it.

And we have a bunch of mini courses in there that help people learn about their brains,

You know,

All sorts of things ranging from what anxiety and stress are to how to work with procrastination.

And there's a course in there called the Brain 101.

And in that course,

We have a bunch of modules that really go in depth into,

For example,

Some of the topics we talked about today,

But other,

You know,

Other basics of the brain as well.

And the idea is,

You know,

If we can learn how our brains work,

We can learn how to work with our brains.

So I'd encourage anybody that's interested,

Download it.

It's a free app.

Take advantage of it.

Sharecare was very generous in making this free for anyone with the idea of like,

Let's help the world wake up.

Very cool.

Yes.

And for those that want to learn about how to care for your brain,

Which is a whole nother series of conversations like inflammation and neurogenesis and the things that we can do lifestyle wise to take better care of our brains.

In that summit that I talked about,

Which is also free,

I have a conversation with Kimberly Wilson who talks about nutritional psychiatry and lifestyle factors to take care of all those 86 billion neurons,

However many you said in the billions.

And then I'll also put a link to this brain hat so you can download your own.

There's a kid version as well.

It's very useful.

Okay.

Thank you,

Dr.

Chen.

Thank you.

All righty.

So the takeaway for today is that we are moving away from these really simplistic reductionistic ways of seeing the brain and turning towards more of an integrative look at how the brain works.

It's more of an orchestra than it is a bunch of solo players.

And a lot of neurotransmitters that we associate with our mental health are actually players in all sorts of other things in our body.

So for example,

Serotonin is a major player in your gut.

Dopamine is a major player in your movement.

Our brain doesn't have a lot of unitaskers.

It's much more of a multitasker approach.

In terms of your daily practice this week,

We can draw upon the last thing that Dr.

Jed and I had a conversation about,

Which is our brain's tendency to interpret and predict the present moment based on our past experiences.

It has these heuristics that it develops and it uses them pretty automatically.

So instead of just automatically believing your perception to be true,

You can pause,

Slow down,

Bring curiosity to the moment and ask,

Are you sure?

If you are depressed,

Are you sure that that person who's looking at you is giving you a negative look or is being hostile?

Are you sure that the assumption you're making isn't based on implicit bias or a stereotype?

Developing your skillset of being present with curious attention,

Taking a second look with a beginner's mind and fresh eyes is a very useful skill and it's a little bit of an upgrade to your brain.

So try that out this week.

Ask yourself,

Are you sure?

And see if you can collect more information by asking that simple question and bringing curiosity to the present moment.

Alrighty.

Thank you so much for this little mini lesson on the brain and I look forward to seeing you all next week.

Don't forget to sign up for the summit from strivingtothriving.

Com.

You will love Kimberly Wilson if you love today and if you want some more action steps around brain health.

She is one of my favorite people out there talking about nutritional psychiatry and brain health and is very engaging.

So don't forget to sign up and make sure to watch that particular conversation with Kimberly Wilson.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Your Life in Process.

When you enter your life in process,

When you become psychologically flexible,

You become free.

If you like this episode or think it would be helpful to somebody,

Please leave a review over at podchaser.

Com and if you have any questions,

You can leave them for me by phone at 805-457-2776 or send me a voicemail by email at podcast at yourlifeinprocess.

Com.

I want to thank my team,

Craig,

Angela Stubbs,

Ashley Hyatt,

Abby Deal,

And thank you to Ben Gold at Bell and Branch for his original music.

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatment.